Were the Roosevelt Years Inherently Conservative?

American conservatism is then, not defined, but rather composed of certain strands of thought which can encompass social, political, religious and economic criteria. These include primarily, a belief in limited government, particularly on a federal level, and in general an adherence to supply-side economics. The associated movements of social and religious conservatism are of lesser importance here; there are often broad discrepancies within conservative ranks themselves on social issues, with some hard libertarians being effectively socially liberal, whilst many religious conservatives particularly those belonging to churches associated with the expanding Fundamentalist Protestant movement, promoted a socially interventionist philosophy based upon biblical morality. Conservatism contends that in a healthy society the individual holds responsibility for his own welfare and destiny, and that it is not within the remit of governmental responsibility to provide for its citizens with nationalised institutions. Consequently the provision for private enterprise is prized within conservative circles and any government with a conservative stance will, in theory, facilitate business and commerce. It is not the purpose here however, to explore the philosophical inconsistencies within conservatism, but to provide a contextual basis for viewing Roosevelt’s political basis and the extent to which it reflected conservative ideals.  

When Roosevelt was inaugurated as President on the 4th March 1933, he had been elected as a reaction to the failure of the previous administration, led by Herbert Hoover, to deal with the consequences of economic collapse. Hoovers inherent mistrust of statist institutions lead to his reluctance to provide any sort of adequate relief measure for those spiralling into poverty as a result of the depression and the mass unemployment it generated. This in turn led to the widespread and politically untenable situation of mass poverty, and widespread suffering in the slums of many American cities. If there was ever a damning indictment that non interventionist conservatism was ill equipped to deal with economic instability, than the human cost of Hoover’s administration was it. Roosevelt then was swept to victory on the promise of helping people; state intervention on an economic basis was fundamentally opposite to conservative principles, but here was Roosevelt, elected on the specific mandate that he uses the resources of the federal government in order to lift people out of the depression. In principle and at the outset, at least, Roosevelt and his policies could in no way be described as conservative.

Whether, in 1933, Roosevelt knew himself how he would be defined politically is also a matter for debate. Such was the almost desperate nature of his initial legislative efforts, it seems that, far from being a part of a coherent ideological plan, they were specific measures aimed at providing relief from the effects of depression, providing employment and attempting to establish some sort of stability. In Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office he launched a quite unprecedented range of legislative measures to meet this aim. These included the establishment of measures and alphabet agencies, such as the civilian conservation corps designed to boost employment and help both the people afflicted by the depression, but also through measures such as the Emergency Banking Act, which aimed to reorganise and reopen the banking system in order to help the financial institutions and businesses affected. These early New Deal measures were neither conservative nor liberal; rather they were simply aimed at promoting eventual recovery through federal legislation.

It was popular too. ‘In the election of 1936 Franklin Roosevelt achieved on of the centuries most smashing triumphs. Running against moderate Republican Alfred M. Landon of Kansas, he carried forty six of the forty eight states with just over 60% of the popular vote.’ Of course the initial relief and recovery stages of the New Deal were, by the late mid 1930’s being supplanted by an increasingly reform focussed administration, and it was in this reform that Roosevelt began to run into opposition to and criticism of his policies. In earlier years of the New Deal, Roosevelt, though criticised by staunch conservatives, had been able to pass New Deal legislation with relative ease. By 1937, however, things had become more difficult and even members of his own party with conservative leanings were beginning to mount against him. For example Senator William Bailey, a Democratic senator for North Carolina and initial, albeit sceptical ally of Roosevelt during the early years of the New Deal, broke away from his party in order to form a bipartisan coalition of conservatives, together with the Republican Arthur Vandenberg, from which any further New Deal institutions could be opposed. For conservatives, the New Deal was a step too far in state regulation, and many felt that excessive New Deal legislation was akin to socialistic politics, something unthinkable even in Roosevelt’s America. Roosevelt himself courted controversy through various incidents, most notably the ‘court packing’ incident of 1937 in which he was accused of attempting to manipulate the membership of the Supreme Court in order to enforce the retirement of conservative judges sceptical to his New Deal measures and replacing them with more willing figures. Roosevelt countered these allegations head on, saying that ‘If by that phrase "packing the Court" it is charged that I wish to place on the bench spineless puppets who would disregard the law and would decide specific cases as I wished them to be decided, I make this answer: that no President fit for his office would appoint, and no Senate of honorable men fit for their office would confirm, that kind of appointees to the Supreme Court.’ As McJimsy points out, there was evidence to suggest that public opinion was behind him to take some form of action against the Supreme Court, but on the whole, public reaction to the court packing incident was deeply suspicious, and it was seen as a potentially dictatorial move, a sign of the inherent conservatism of the American people. Staunchly opposed by Bailey and Vandenberg’s conservative coalition, Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court ultimately failed in the face of conservative opposition, but also thanks to the deaths of other key figures and the announcement of the retirement of one of the ‘four horsemen’ of conservative judges at the end of that year. The court packing incident had shown that both the American Senate and the American people were still thoroughly sceptical about the role of the president in dictating the Supreme Court, but this was not just a conservative phenomenon. Roosevelt may have felt that, coming off the back of such a decisive electoral victory, that he was free to pursue policies which were electorally unpopular, the court packing incident brought him back down to earth, but not as a conservative.

The court packing incident was compounded a year later when New Deal spending forced the American economy into another recession. Such events served only to strengthen conservative opposition to Roosevelt, and the next presidential election held in 1940 was not a repeat of the astonishing victory of 1936. However despite this, Roosevelt had still inflicted a crushing defeat on his opponent, retaining the popular vote and never being in danger of any substantial threat from the Republican Party. The American people, it would seem, despite Roosevelt’s lack of conservatism still elected him in force. It is arguable that it was during the Roosevelt years that party political boundaries changed. Such was Roosevelt’s radicalism, and consequent unpopularity amongst conservative Democrats, particularly those in the South, that the era brought about a change in the party political dynamic which is still evident today. This did not happen easily, men like William Bailey, for example, responded to suggestions that he should lead a conservative coalition of Democrats and Republicans, by saying that ‘Great issues create political parties, but the work of creation should come naturally from the people rather than from political leaders. At present the battle line is well drawn on the issues rather than parties. Let us stick to our issues.’ This would seem to indicate that he felt that a conservative agenda would come naturally, rather than needing to be forced.  The Roosevelt recession strengthened the resolve of conservative politicians on both sides to stand up against the president and increasing congress became divided across liberal and conservative, rather than Democrat and Republican lines. Roosevelt however did not cross to either, making it clear that he favoured a continuation of New Deal measures, with both pro and anti business measures. It was clear that, even though he was subjected to heavy criticism from the left, his most vehement critics came from within the conservative ranks.

If his most fierce contemporary critics were conservative, this cannot be said for the historiography, where the most vitriolic indictments of the New Deal are often found in the writings left wing critics such as Barton Berstein and Paul Conkin who, far from saying that the New Deal went too far in terms of central government interference in economic issues, argue that it did not go far enough and did not succeed in its aims of alleviating poverty, and redistribute wealth. Conkin sees the New Deal as a ‘missed opportunity’ and casts particular scorn on the idea that the New Deal was an exercise in experimentation and pragmatism, for Conkin the New Deal ‘denied the idea of experimentation - clear hypothesis and controlled verification’. This does seem a rather petty criticism; political reality is not a laboratory and does not work as such. Roosevelt’s form of experimental politics was drawn not out of a conservative philosophy, but out of circumstance. There was little he could do to in the early 1930’s to make the situation worse, and a lot he could do to make the situation better. Bernstein contends that the New Deal ultimately failed to alleviate poverty, to redistribute wealth, or promote equality and racial desegregation’. He has a point; the New Deal did not end any of these social ills. However, the aim of the New Deal was not to solve all America’s problems, it was simply to get the economy in the functional and prosperous state it had been in the 1920’s. The New Deal was also remarkably good for many people; at least a huge improvement to their lot under the conservatism of Hoover. The benefits, like so much in this period, were mixed. African Americans found the early New Deal reforms especially damaging, The National Recovery Administration excluded agriculture and domestic labour, which absorbed at least 75% of employed blacks. The new jobs created were invariably taken up by whites, and in many New Deal institutions such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, segregation was in force. Despite this, the black electorate flocked to the New Deal and whether ‘seduced by Roosevelt’s rhetoric’, or simply responding out of desperation to the idea of hope, something which was certainly not offered by Roosevelt’s conservative rivals, it is clear that the criticisms levelled at Roosevelt by his leftist critics cannot really be attributed to any ‘conservatism’ on the part of Roosevelt himself.

The Roosevelt years then were inherently unconservative. They were a period of huge reform in both the role of the presidency and of federal government vastly expanded, and an age of economic and social intervention when previously there had been as little as possible. This was in part necessitated by circumstance; an unprecedented situation like the great depression called for an unprecedented solution. Whatever the criticisms levelled at Roosevelt, they cannot be attributed to any sense of conservatism in either his methods or aims. The problem is that the society in which he was enacting these radical schemes was, for all its pluralism, on the whole inherently conservative, particularly in areas such as the south. For a politician whose rhetoric spoke of delivering for everybody, that also included conservative thinkers and big business. The most profound effects of Roosevelt’s policies on conservatism in America was then to usher in the redrawing of party political lines on a liberal/conservative basis; and to redefine the nature of the role of president to the extent that never again would a presidency along truly conservative lines be possible.

Bibliography

Online Resources

 - Roosevelt’s Radio Address to the New York Herald Tribune Forum in 1939. Hosted at the American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara. [Visited 26 04 2008]

 - Fireside Chat from March  1937. Hosted at the American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara. [Visited 26 04 2008]

Secondary Sources

J. S. Auerbach, ‘New Deal, Old Deal, or Raw Deal: Some Thoughts on New Left Historiography’ in The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 35, No. 1. (Houston, 1969), pp. 18-30

A. J. Badger, The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933-1940 (Chicago, 1992)  

B. Bernstein ‘The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform’ in B. Bernstein (ed) Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York, 1968)  

W.F. Buckley (ed) Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century (Indianapolis, 1970)

Paul K. Conkin, The New Deal (Wheeling, 1992)

G. McJimsy, The Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Kansas, 2000)

J.R Moore, Senator Josiah W. Bailey and the "Conservative Manifesto" of 1937 in The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 31, No. 1, (Houston, 1965), p. 32

M. Newman, The Civil Rights Movement (Edinburgh, 2004)

W. Pederson, The FDR Years (New York, 2006)